Botan 1.5.13 review

Botan is a C++ library implementing a variety of cryptographic algorithms and formats. At this time, it is quite stable, and is suitable for use in a wide variety of programs. Botan's license makes it free for use as part of any commercial or free software without restriction.

It runs on most Unix/POSIX systems and Win32, and on many hardware platforms, including x86, x86-64, IA-64, PowerPC, SPARC, Alpha, MIPS, and ARM. See here for more information about portability.

The library proper is written in ISO C++, but there are optional modules which can be compiled into the library, providing features like zlib compression, high-resolution timers, and automatic entropy gathering.

Botan also has support for the crypto accellerators made by AEP Systems, and can easily be extended to support other hardware accellerators in the future.

It was originally written and is currently maintained by Jack Lloyd, though several others have contributed bug fixes, modules, and other help. Read doc/thanks.txt, included in the distribution, for a list of their names.

What's New in This Release:
This is the first release candidate for the new stable tree of Botan.
Three modules which had not been updated to reflect new APIs have been corrected, and support for the Intel and PathScale compilers on x86-64 has been improved.